Less Simple than it Looks

The Simple View formula presented by Gough and Tunmer in 1986 is presented as a suspiciously precise maths equation:

Reading Comprehension = Decoding x Language Comprehension

which suggests that you can accurately calculate a reader’s ability to comprehend a text by multiplying how fluently they can unpick the letters on a page (decoding) by how effectively they’d comprehend the text if it was read aloud to them. 

As you can’t measure any of these variables with precision, what’s the point of an equation?

Nevertheless I found the Science of Reading podcast about the Simple View of Reading interesting and useful. It has helped me understand two puzzling examples from my teaching career. 

The Mystery of The Struggling Reader

I was teaching the year 6 group which we wanted to boost up to level 4. I had a pupil who was very able verbally. Her language comprehension was very good. If I read aloud to the class, she has an excellent understanding of the text. But her reading scores were very low. It wasn’t until I asked her to read aloud to me that I found her decoding skills were very weak. 

The Simple View of Reading formula helps explain the situation – when decoding is weak, it brings the comprehension score right down. She needed fluency practice. 

The Riddle of Weak Correlation

Two summers ago, I was trying to see whether I could create an early warning system to identify pupils who were likely to go on to struggle with reading. I was looking at the reading SATs results for individual pupils and seeing how far back I could go and identify whether they were on track or falling behind. 

I found that creating an average of year 3 and 4 data gave me a lower key stage 2 reading score which correlated very well with their SATs reading score. In fact, the correlation was better than the past paper the same students completed in Autumn of year 6. In other words, you can predict who is likely to struggle and intervene 2 years earlier than the mock past paper. 

So I looked even further back and tried to see whether I could identify the struggling readers from the year 2 phonics score. I could not. The phonics score was a poor predictor of later reading success. 

The Simple View of Reading helps understand this. Most pupils catch up with their decoding by year 6. The difference between pupils is better predicted by their language comprehension than their decoding skill. I would be better off looking for a correlation between their knowledge of the world scores. So I did. I combined their science, history and geography scores from year 3 and found a good correlation between their year 6 SATs reading score and their year 3 subject knowledge. 

Conclusion

If a pupil is struggling with reading assessments, check whether the problem is more decoding or language comprehension and proceed from there. 

To Develop Decoding Fluency	To Develop Language Comprehension
Getting students to practice reading aloud with fluency is a good way to develop fluency. You can use echo reading techniques (multiple rereadings of a section of text, emphasising prosody and expression). EEF blog: Reading Fluency Practice in the Primary Classroom	Develop the students’ subject knowledge. When using texts, the teacher should read aloud to them, asking questions as they go. EEF Blog: Reading aloud with your class – what does the research say?